KU Distinguished Alumnus Ron McCurdy (left) will perform his “Langston Hughes Project,” a multimedia tribute to the poet (right) at KU at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 7.
By Nick Krug
Sunday, April 2, 2017
For many in town, the name Ron McCurdy might be linked with fond memories of trumpets and tubas blasting over the triumphs of Danny Manning and Larry Brown while McCurdy served as director of the University of Kansas Basketball Band in the late ‘80s. It’s possible that KU music majors may have recorded jazz pieces within a Murphy Hall studio named after McCurdy, where he once served as the school’s first director of Jazz Studies.
But for everyone else stateside and far flung around the globe, McCurdy, a KU Distinguished Alumnus, is best known for creating “The Langston Hughes Project,” which he has performed internationally and which he will be bringing back to KU during a performance on April 7 in Swarthout Recital Hall.
McCurdy describes “The Langston Hughes Project,” which was voted “Best Live Performance” at the 2016 Jazz FM Awards in London, as an emotionally-stirring, multimedia concert performance. Hughes’ 1960 work “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” is recited in a spoken-word style, accompanied by a jazz quartet performance before a visual backdrop of imagery from the Harlem Renaissance. That imagery, according to McCurdy, features many of Hughes’ artistic collaborators and the events, people and places of the Harlem Renaissance that inspired him.
read more at: http://www.lawrence.com/news/2017/apr/02/ku-distinguished-alumni-gives-jazz-tribute-langs/
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